THIS debut collection of stories is beautifully designed: untreated, bare board covers with industrial lettering, un-laminated, no dust jacket, and held together with what appears to be orange fabric dressing strip on its spine. It is appropriately r
ough and uncompromising – indeed, it looks like a book that could hold its own in a fist-fight.
The Knockemstiff of the title is a tiny, stricken town in south Ohio, "so deprived and diminished it no longer appears on any map". All the stories are set there, with characters drifting between tales as aimlessly as in their lives. Part of the wonderful melancholy of this book is realising, suddenly, that we've met a character before; and that we know more about why they are damaged, dangerous and desperate than anyone in the story. Rather than the cosy feeling of recognition, we get the hard business of understanding.
Knockemstiff is a place of bars where "no one who drank there was ever completely healed", peopled by men like Big Bernie, "fifty-six years old and sloppy fat and stuck in southern Ohio like the smile on a dead clown's ass" and body-builder Luther Colburn, who sleeps in his gym (a converted gas station) where "on rainy nights the fumes rising out of the oil-stained cement smelled like dinosaur blood". It is unremitting, brutal and hideously conscious of its failure. Pollock may well have created a whole new genre: poverty gothic.
At first, I was afraid that this was another tiresomely shocking slice of dirty realism. The content of the stories – a thuggish father cajoling his son into a fight, a hobo rapist with learning difficulties, a bored teenager masturbating over his sister's doll – would seem to indicate familiar if gruesome literary territory. But Pollock's prose is full of traps and poetry, and a subtle understanding of human complexity. Take these sentences: "And even though she was probably the best woman Del Murray had ever been with – gobs of bare-knuckle sex, the latest psychotropic drugs, a government check – he was still embarrassed to be seen with her in public. Anyone who's ever dated a retard will understand what he was up against." It's sly and direct; it lures then repulses the reader. This is utterly unlike Irvine Welsh's underclass tourism, promising the frisson of opprobrium from the safety of stereotype.
Of course, the denizens of Knockemstiff dream of escape, and never find it. And they know they will never find it. As the narrator of 'Pills' puts it, in his own hauntingly stark elegance, "Looking up, I saw the red blinking lights of an airliner, miles above me, heading west. I'd never been on a plane, but I imagined the big-shot bastards on vacation, movie stars with beautiful lives. I wondered if they could see Frankie's fire from up there. I wondered what they would think of us". Instead of real escapes, they make do with temporary flights into drink, drugs and sex. One particular story stands as a motif for this trap. 'Discipline' is about body-building, and the idea that a cocktail of steroids, a posing pouch and a fixed grin equals self-improvement is one of the book's saddest ironies.
Some time-honoured "rules" of writing are knocked sideways – there's no guarantee that a first person narration won't end in an account of the narrator's death, or that an odd-couple comedy won't feint and swerve into a truly shocking abuse. Throughout, Pollock's black humour counteracts the gnawing depression of the characters' lives, as when a small time crook tells us about his addiction: "My head became a perfect holiday, my nerves foamy little buds of milk. The Oxy filled holes in me I hadn't even realised were empty. It was, at least for those first few months, a wonderful way to be disabled".
This is a world so stripped of human normality that the characters' self-hatred becomes their sole redeeming feature, their last connection to humanity. These stories are narrated from inside these ruined lives, and you can check in your moral presumptions at each opening sentence. Knockemstiff is a serious, moving, funny, dark collection. I can't wait for Pollock's first novel to be published.
The full article contains 712 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
